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Friday, October 5, 2012

Focus

Okay, so I was typing with my son this past week. He has to log onto this website and complete 250 races, and to sort of encourage him through this somewhat tedious task, I challenged him to try to beat me.

Like that's gonna happen. Ha! But really, he did beat me in a couple where I gave him a head start.

Typing. Exciting times. But it did give me this blog post. One of the quotes we typed included this line: "Focus on your own performance rather than on the competition."

It comes from this book. No lie. SPEED SECRETS, you guys!

The beginning part of the quote we typed said something about how sometimes a car in front of you can be good motivation, and then it went straight for the jugular with the whole "focus on your own performance" line.

I mean, seriously. It's so perfect for writing! Sometimes we are motivated by those who are ahead of us on the track. We see them and what they've done, and we have hope that we can replicate their success.

Sometimes we have to be the lead car. Sometimes we're blazing our own path.

And sometimes we just need to focus on our own performance, putting blinders on to everything else around us.

30 comments:

What a perfect quote. I remind my children (and myself) of this on a regular basis. We relate it to swimming. When my children swam I was always telling them that winning a particular heat wasn't important. Their goal was to always improve their fastest time and swim their best. This is so true in writing. Shouldn't we always be trying to improve upon our previous best?

Great quote and an excellent post. It is far too easy to get sucked into comparing yourself to everyone else. My husband keeps telling me: "Look how far you've come." Maybe it's about time I started listening to him!

*snort* There's a reason for that wisdom in the book. If you're not focused on your own performance, you might crash, and die in a fireball. Fortunately that doesn't happen with writing. Right? At least I hope it doesn't?

My focus is on finishing right now. Finish the synopsis, finish editing it, finish editing the query, finish this first draft, etc. I have a lot of irons in the fire right now, project-wise. Basically when I'm not at work, I'm working on something related to writing. (Like right now, focus on networking.)

That is a very true quote. Sometimes, we can can trip ourselves up by focusing on what others are doing because we eventually lose sight of what we're doing or what we've truly accomplished. Also, we may look at what others have accomplished and get bogged down by the disappointment of not doing the same as "the Joneses". So it is very important to focus on our own performance and channel our energy in doing the very best we can...whether in writing or any other thing in life.

Good motto. No matter what there will always be someone on a different part of the path, or who is better at a certain element than us. Comparing ourselves only causes depression and makes us want to quit. And quitting is the only way to lose the race.

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